From Oral to Vaginal Sex: Transformation of Gender and Sexual Persons Across 40 years of Sambia Societal Change

This paper examines the radical transition from traditional to modern sexual culture among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea, an animistic tribal people studied by the author since 1974. Traditionally, the sexual debut of males was via same-sex oral ritualized homosexuality, while the sexual debut of young women was oral sex in which they fellated their fiancé or husband, before advancing on to vaginal sex a few months later. Huge change has occurred over two generations. Historically, Evangelical Christianity entered Sambia sociality in the 1960s through Seventh Day Adventist preaching and disparaging of local social and ritual practice, resulting in erosion of traditional culture.

This radical psychosocial and cultural transformation has brought about the existence of a new norm: ‘sharing the same blanket and bed’ – a metaphor for gender equality and greater autonomy among women. Whereas, pre-colonial social arrangements normed gender segregation, ritual initiation secret practices, and antagonistic marital exchange between semi-hostile clan hamlets, the new discursive practice imagines relative gender equality via Christianity in material and sexual practice. Among the most powerful effects of this change has been the radical unlearning of heteronormal oral sex (a woman fellating her husband) in favour of exclusive vaginal sex with the implicit or explicit aim of pleasuring both partners. The traditional Sambia sexual belief system also treated semen as an elixir and stimulant to growth and fertility, making boys’ oral ingestion of semen, and young women’s oral insemination a part of human development. This paper examines these socio-sexual changes over the past 40 years – both in terms of what appears to be the advance towards modernity and the move away from it.

Professor Gilbert Herdt

PhD; Founding Director and Professor, Graduate Program in Human Sexuality, California Institute for Integral Studies. Emeritus Director, National Sexuality Resource Center & Professor of Sexuality and Anthropology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California, United States